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1/18/08 1:14:51 PM#21
Originally posted by paulscott The problem is, reasonable minds can differ as to what features make a good game. ____________________________________________ |
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1/18/08 1:17:04 PM#22
I guess we all have our opinions but the main problem I see is companies worry too much about maximizing profits. They try to please everyone and end up pleasing very few people. If someone wants to make a hardcore game then do everything you can to appeal to that player type. If someone wants to make a casual player or role player oriented game then make the game specifically for that market. The problem is not that someone needs to come up with some innovative new style of game like zombies from space or some other bizarre idea. The problem I see is that companies are not willing to commit to making a game for a specific target audience. Currently companies seem to be latching on to ideas that they hope will maximize profits instead of making something that the developers would actually want to play.
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1/18/08 1:21:27 PM#23
All game makers are taking a risk, theres no safe bet in business. Theres just a lot of crappy game makers and the good ones have no reason to risk their success for the sake of entertaining bored gamers. |
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1/18/08 1:40:29 PM#24
Originally posted by thar_blast I actually think that "bizarre" settings are what tank a fair number of games. The setting should be recognizable. It's the gameplay that needs to be innovative, or at least polished. WoW didn't get 9 million subscribers because it's easy. It got 9 million subscribers because, regardless of what you think about the gameplay, art style, graphics, or community, it is an incredibly polished product, based in a very popular setting, and in which Blizzard made an unprecedented investment. Blizzard took a well established gameplay model, and simply made it better than anyone else ever did. If WoW's simplistic gameplay were the reason for its success, there is no reason why it would have more than 10 times as many subscribers as EQ2. Perhaps the same thing would work if Lucas Arts copied the model of Eve Online and morphed it into a new Star Wars MMO. In fact, I can't imagine how awesome it would be to combine Eve Online and Planetside into a single MMO based on Star Wars. ____________________________________________ |
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1/18/08 2:03:25 PM#25
I really think people are focusing too much on WoW. There is no denying Blizzard did a lot of things right and also Blizzard had a good rep in the gaming industry. They also marketed the game well. There was an extra set of disks in the collectors edition I bought and I gave them to a coworker. I no longer play but she still does and she got an account for her husband as well. People are focusing on the game so much and forgetting that Blizzard has a well known name and good reputation and did an excellent job of putting the word out on their game. The problems I have with WoW personally are: 1. It doesn't encourage grouping enough 2. The raid oriented end game 3. The big advantage players have with raid gear 4. The graphics are not very visually appealing to me |
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1/18/08 2:17:36 PM#26
Alot of you, just like game developers and investors can't see the big picture. Online virtual worlds will be a multi trillion dollar industry and what ever country grapes it first will be able to create a huge semi monopoly just like microsoft or hollywood. When we talk about innovation we don't mean (i hope) improved combat systems or better lvling. We have more youth today on the internet then those watching tv. In 20 years time these people will grow up and a huge market will open up for enterainment, documenties and news that people will want to see in a interactive way. Instead of watching a documentary on fish we will be able to explore the sea from our computer. We will be able to walk around ancient rome. What we need to see is investment in softwear and hardwear so developers can easily create. Developers need equipment to quickly scan a room, person or object and take a picture of it so everything from the model to the textures automatically become virtual. We need programmes that can quickly work out how an object should react. We need investment in better servers and internet connections.
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Originally posted by markoraos This is exactly what I was hoping to see as a response to my question.
And there have been others, too.
Innovation does not necessarily mean failure in the MMORPG industry...I agree, the track record for rewarding innovation is not very good in this industry, but in order for a company in this genre of gaming to ever capture a WoW sized subscription based they most certainly need to think "outside the box".
More importantly, as someone very astutely observed, the player-base of MMO's have almost unanimously rejected innovation thus far. Is this going to continue? Are we really THAT shallow? Or, are we, when viewed as a whole (15 million or so subscribers in total), still extremely newbish to the whole MMORPG dynamic and don't fully comprehend the consequences of our addiction to simplistic, mind-numbing gaming experiences?
With all the flaming, trolling, and whining that goes on on this forum, and many others like it, I must say that so far the responses to the initial question have been very insightful and encouraging! So, who's going to begin the movement to demand better MMORPG's by staging a mass walk-out? Let's say by March we all cancel our MMORPG subscriptions and enjoy the spring and summer weather...maybe by September some of the major developers might reconsider the direction of their future projects!!
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1/18/08 2:50:37 PM#28
Originally posted by sekrog You really think they want to spend millions of dollars making a game that a couple hundred people will love? Big risk = big losses. That's how it works. You're not going to FORCE them to do anything with their millions. You would have a better chance of winning a lottery, or even more farfetched, actually earning millions of dollars yourself. Twit. |
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Originally posted by Iijs Wow, that hurt. Not really.
Still, I can't disagree with your observation of how the industry sees the MMORPG player-base. The problem is, many of them are taking big risks NOW and losing big money NOW. What is at issue, is that it appears that the risks they are taking are not creative ones. Instead, it is just money being thrown at developers that have convinced investors that they know the WoW formula...and they're going set about building the next WoW. This just ain't gonna happen. In addition, I'm not going to respond to your name-calling, not because I don't have you pegged, but because there is really no benefit in doing so...unless, of course, I was insecure or felt somehow inadequate and by calling you a name I might make myself somehow feel better for a short time. Instead, I'm simply going to move on to the vast majority of responses that are actually worth reading.
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1/18/08 3:18:13 PM#30
My thought to all the people who want to know where the risk takers are... You too can be a risk taker. Put your money where your mouth is, find a small video game company that is making a game that you like and invest. How many of you actually have invested (will invest) in any such companies. It's very easy to start throwing around such phrases as "People don't take risks", "Everyone is playing it safe", "Everyone is copying what works", when you have no monetary involvement. I wonder how many of you work for companies that are small startups just scraping by. Those are the risk-takers! So if you truly want to see games that are actually interesting then become part of the process.
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1/18/08 3:36:32 PM#31
I think EA bought them out and dismantled them. |
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1/18/08 3:44:14 PM#32
Originally posted by sekrogThis might sound trite and over generalized, but once you start talking about mass market, which is what WoW level stuff is, you simply can't inconvience or alienate people too much and expect it to sell.
You can have a great game or a great movie or a great TV show. But put in something that offends them and they will hate it. Put in something like an hour long intermission and they will leave. Make it weird and hard to understand and they will shrug and leave.
To be sure each of those can attract some number of people but not a whole lot of people. And MMORPGs are expensive enough that they need quite a number of people. Further people now expect them to be huge and bug free and since they involve at least of 4 of the currently fairly hard domains of Computer Science they take a very large investment.
This is about sales. Sales is about seducing people into using/buying your product. Its about generating a happy feel good mood about a product.
In this sense the only place for innovation is in regards to excitement about the future and being on the cutting edge. And any other part of the seduction that is flubbed breaks the mood and makes that innovation just a puff of smoke in the wind.
This isn't to say the MMORPG devs do not innovate anyway, but they don't do it for the "reward" taht gamers are going to give them really or because they truly expect to see a gain over some more standard approach. They do it because they like the idea and after some testing think it is fun enough to work. I really doubt many developers expect any great reward from innovation, only in so much as they can use that mystique of innovation to market the game itself.
Innovation has no real stand alone value in a large scale sales sense. Ask yourselves if you think Game design input from the average player has any use? If your answer is not much. Then ask yourself how these people can really even appreciate true innovation anyway. Or even whether a particular feature really is innovative.
Now ask yourself a related question. Why is WoW the way it is? Why do they consistently decline random content generation, even though they did it in Diablo? What is the ethos of Blizzard? It is polished, quality content and interface. They want scripted, finely crafted encounters because they can control the quality. Even if they could do innovative stuff with randomly generated content they would not do so because it would take away from the quality that is the center point of their content. Even though these encounters get old they know people will still be impressed by them instead of doing something that changes but is not quite as finely crafted/tuned.
They do the same thing with classes and locking down the balancing. people complain they want more classes but in the end Blizzard is wise to make sure they have it all nailed down before they even attemtp such a thing. Because if they added a bunch of new classes and changed the complexion of the game, they will have undermined the foundation of WoW's success.
Why do you think crazy balance swings drive so many people away? It makes them feel uncertain and bad about the game itself. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship (not meant to be pejorative about the people there).
What you DO NOT DO is often as important as what you DO. People get on Blizzard for lack of innovation, I say it shows just how smart they can be that they actually decline some innovations they could do and have experience with. Because the net effect is actually detrimental because lessening quality for innovation is only tolerated by a minority of people. I say this about Blizzard, that they are smart to do this, even though I am in that minority.
This isn't to say that WoW's design is the best you can get. Or that the forced grouping stuff will result in the height of quality. But it illustrates the ethos of Blizzard that their conservatism in this regard is well founded and wise.
Too much tinkering with something is as much of a sign of a bad craftsman as not enough tinkering with things.
WoW could have been the most innovative game or one of the least innovative games. In the end it doesn't matter because the real strength of WoW is that they set the right mood for the customer and have an ethos of never ever ever letting anything interfere with it.
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1/18/08 3:48:26 PM#33
We can't force these companies to try something different. We can, however, support the innovative games when they do come. We could certainly stand to do more of that. Now, as for new, innovative, original MMO titles, we need to look at the kinds of games that people like to play, that are not the sorts of games currently on the market. What comes to mind is something that is easy to pick up and play, but has a decent amount of difficulty and some added depth in the gameplay department. And, for some odd reason, the very first thing that pops into my head is Super Mario 64. Mario, as many of you are aware, is a fairly simple little concept of a plummer saving a land of mushroom-headed people from an evil, fire-breathing turtle. He does this, mostly, with his talent for acrobatic jumping. Super Mario 64, specifically, was one of the earliest 3D platformers and is still among the best. With that in mind, I suggest an MMO platformer in the same league as Mario 64. It need not star Mario himself, or take place in the same world, but the mechanics of a simple little hop-and-bop adventure, chatting and teaming, and a few other small bells and whistles, would not only rake in cash for the company who makes it, but it would be pretty fun to play as well. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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1/18/08 4:06:25 PM#34
Originally posted by Tecknic You make a good point, and there's no reason an MMO cannot be really simple to start, and branch out and get more complicated later. Developers are trying to learn lessons from WoW, but they are learning the WRONG lessons. Take SWG, for example. Now, SWG had many little problems that added up to a game that overall was a big dissappointment to the average player. But the biggest problem with the game was that, when you finished creating your character, you were basically plopped into the middle of a barren world with nothing really to do. A lot of people (I was almost one of them) probably bought the game, and when they started playing, said to themselves, "ok, now WTF do I do?" The one thing the NGE did right was to add a directed starting experience to the game to get players used to the game mechanics and to draw them into the world. But there was no reason they had to gut the combat system and character progression to add this, and this kind of start should have been in the game from the beginning. Once the player was engaged in the game, understood the profession system, and felt at home, it would then be fine to throw them to the wolves and let them have a more open-ended experience. The dissapointing performance of SWG had nothing to do with the "complex" character progression system or the "non-starwarsy" combat mechanics. It was the lack of polish and lack of any engaging content from the start that ruined what should have been a multi-million account game. ____________________________________________ |
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1/18/08 4:19:27 PM#35
Originally posted by Iijs Herein lies part of the issue. People believing that it is more farfetched to earn a million dollars than to win the lottery. The reality is that you are far more likely to earn a million dollars than win it in a lottery -- in fact, orders of magnitude more likely. The difference of course is that earning a million dollars takes a lot of effort, while walking to the 7-11 and buying a ticket takes little effort at all.
There are many risk takers already in the MMO industry. Problem is most of you don't or won't support them. It is not enough to boycott the McDonalds of MMO games. You have to support the Independant MMO makers to show the industry their's a market. That means effort on your part. That means supporting independant games. That means giving up the lip service so many of you pay to innovation and actually supporting innovation. To the OP, no, I'm not going to throw out ideas here because it's pointless. Not until there's a fundamental shift in the way we think about independant games so that players actually support them will daydreaming about the "what ifs" bear any fruit. Day dreaming without action is delusional, and psychologically so. So here's the first step in action: You, reading this, adopt an indie game and pay a subscription to it. You can still have your polished WoWs, your Conans, your WARs, but add this second account. And stick with it. This is a course of action you can take, short of beginning to develop your own game. Anything else is delusional. |
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1/18/08 4:38:24 PM#36
I would just like it if they added voice acting, cutscenes, and an engrossing story. |
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1/18/08 4:44:21 PM#37
Originally posted by Cerion Which is what I did, in effect, when I joined EVE back in early 2004. Of course now the game has hit the bigtime, but it was different then. To be honest I don't think as many people want innovation as claim to want it. When innovative games come along (and they have been out there), what you usually get is "OMG tihs game suxs" flames everywhere and noone plays the game. ---------------------------------------- |
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1/18/08 5:04:18 PM#38
^ I, myself, have volunteered to help out with beta for Football Superstars, an MMORPG based around, of all things, soccer. I haven't seen anything quite so unique. Support innovation, or the world will turn gray. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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1/18/08 5:28:28 PM#39
Originally posted by Novaseeker Yep and if you mention an innovative and truly different game like Neocron they certainly make no effort to actually try the free trial.
I mean come on its a frigging free trial! At least try it.
Auto Assault though was the most depressing.
I mean some hater from Beta would come on here and say the game sucks nothign good about it. You could talk about all the good points and he would go oh well the cars handle like crap so that game sucks. So the actual use of acceleration, which exists in almost no MMO and instead usally have instant and highly regulated velocity, that means nothing? Yep. So dragging a corpse around on the bumper of your car while its arm waved around, that means nothing? Yep. So having an environment with more intraction than most other MMOs that means nothing? Yep. So a game with real frcition based effects that are simply impossible to do correctly in other games, like an oil slick and skidding and snow that is actually slippery, these mean nothing? Yep. So a game that actually has gravity, not toons stuck to the floor, such that going up a hill makes you go slower, this means nothing? Yep.
So the game sucks? Yep, the content got boring and I didn't like the way the card handled. Whole games sucks.
I mean, my god, snow that is actually slippery? Where were all the champions of immersion, here? They apparently just want the world to be big not actually have a world that is real? Why didn't people demand slippery snow in Vanguard? Why don't they demand that sort of immersion where you climb a mountain, actually slip on snow, like you should and slide down the mountain according to gravity. Wouldn't that be just as important as a long view distance? Climbing a mountain to look at the valley below is all well and cool but imaginge what it would be like if snow actually acted like snow rather than being just a white texture.
Guess what all you immersion minded explorers it was already implemented and roundly trashed and ignored and never given proper credit even by the many people who tried out. They implemented all sorts of immersion type things, things that made the world more real. But guess what they got instead of immersion people. Whole game sucks, its instanced.
Just imagine what the community would have been like if the discourse had been slightly different. Imagine what people would saying if instead they said "Hey Auto Assault wasn't my cup of tea, but you know what they had some awesome stuff in that game. Imagine if Vanguard had some of those physics effects. Along with its huge world and large view distance."
So a game with a large game world with no instances is more immersive and realistic than a world with instancing that has gravity and slippery snow? No sorry. That is wrong. They are both fake for different reasons. Some people jsut let their hatred of instancing over shadow things.
Imagine if you could have a game with no instancing. Real gravity and slippery snow. Rather than no-instancing and fake ass meaningless textures. How can someone call themselves someone interesting in immersion and exploration when climbing a mountain or running up a hill is not affected by gravity? How fake can you get?
Do you really think you are going to get that now that the only MMO that ever even tried to implement half of that went out of business and is still never given any credit for its asston of cool features, despite whatever deficiencies it may have had? No you won't.
And the sad fact is half the people who said "Instancing? No thanks, that isn't immersive." they just turned up their noses and never even tried the game. Never even considered it may possibly have other aspects that maybe, just maybe they might realize are just as important to immersion.
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1/18/08 10:24:43 PM#40
Originally posted by gestalt11Admittedly I know almost nothing about it, but from my point of view, the problem with Auto Assault is that it was (or at least appeared to be) an MMO based entirely on driving around and fighting in cars, which is an utterly retarded concept for an MMO. It was not even worth the effort of downloading the demo. If that's not what it actually was, then they didn't do a very good job conveying its depth through their advertising. This goes to my earlier point about innovation and risk not being about the environments, but about the depth and mechanics of the game. ____________________________________________ |
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